Nothing you don’t know, but let me just say it: the world’s a weird
place. In my younger years, I might have said “crazy,” but that was back
when I thought being crazy was a cool thing and only regretted I
wasn’t.

I mean, do you ever think about how you ended up where you are? And I’m not actually talking about the Oval Office, though that’s undoubtedly a weird enough story in its own right.

After all, you were a community organizer and a constitutional law
professor and now, if you stop to think about it, here’s where you’ve
ended up: you’re using robots to assassinate people you personally pick as targets. You’ve overseen and escalated off-the-books robot air wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, and are evidently considering expanding them to Mali and maybe even Libya. You’ve employed what will someday be defined as a weapon of mass destruction, launching history’s first genuine cyberwar against a country that isn’t threatening to attack us. You’ve agreed to the surveillance of more Americans
every which way from Sunday than have ever been listened in on or
(given emailing, texting, and tweeting) read. You came into office
proclaiming a “sunshine” policy and yet your administration has classified more documents (92,064,862 in 2011) than any other in our history. Despite signing a Whistleblower Enhancement Protection Act, you’ve used
the Espionage Act on more government whistleblowers and leakers than
all previous administrations combined, and yet your officials continue
to leak secret material they see as advantageous to the White House without fear of prosecution. Though you deep-sixed
the Bush administration name for it — “the Global War on Terror”
(ridding the world of GWOT, one of the worst acronyms ever) — you’ve
accepted the idea that we are “at war” with terror and on a “global
battlefield” which (see above) you’re actually expanding. You’re still keeping
uncharged, untried prisoners of not-quite-war in an offshore military
prison camp of injustice that, on the day you came into office, you promised
to close within a year. You’re overseeing planning that, according to
recent reports, will continue the Afghan War in some form until at
least 2017 or possibly well beyond. You preside over an administration that has encouraged the further militarization of the CIA (to which you appointed
as director not a civilian but a four-star general you presumably
wanted to tuck safely away during campaign season). You’ve overseen
the further militarization of the State Department; you’ve encouraged a major expansion of the special operations forces
and its secret presidential army, the Joint Special Operations Command,
cocooned inside the U.S. military/ You’ve overseen the further
post-9/11 expansion of an already staggering
national security budget and the further growth of our labyrinthine
“Intelligence Community” — and though who remembers anymore, you even
won what must have been the first prospective Nobel Prize for Peace more or less before you did a damn thing, and then thanked the Nobel Committee with a full-throated defense
of the right of the U.S. to do what it pleased, militarily, on the
planet! And if that isn’t a weird legacy-in-formation, what is?

I mean, you have my sympathies. The Bush administration did you no
favors. You inherited hell for a foreign policy and when it came to
matters like Guantanamo, the Republicans in Congress hung you out to
dry.

Still, who woulda thunk it? Don’t these “accomplishments” of yours
sometimes amaze you? Don’t you ever wake up in the middle of the night
wondering just who you are? Don’t you, like me, open your eyes some
mornings in a state of amazement about just how you ended up on this
particular fast-morphing planet? Are you as stunned as I am by the fact
that a tanker carrying liquid natural gas is now making a trip from Norway to Japan across the winter
waters of the Arctic? Twenty days at sea lopped off an otherwise
endless voyage via the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian and Pacific
Oceans. Did you ever think you’d live to see the opening of the
Northeast Passage in winter? Don’t you find it ironic that fossil fuels,
which helped burn that oceanic hole in the Arctic ice, were the first
commercial products shipped through those open waters? Don’t you find it
just a tad odd that you can kill someone in distant Yemen without the
slightest obstacle and yet you’ve been able to do next to nothing when
it comes to global warming? I mean, isn’t that world-championship weird,
believe-it-or-not bizarre, and increasingly our everyday reality?

Aren’t you amazed that your Pentagon has recently issued a directive meant to ensure that armed robots will never kill human beings on their own?
Not so long ago, that was the stuff of sci-fi; now, it’s the subject of
a bureaucratic document. Tell that to Skynet someday, right?

Who could make this stuff up? Maybe William Gibson — maybe he already did — but not me and my guess is not you either.

Putting Yourself in a Box

I know that we humans are terrible at predicting the future. Still,
if I had told you back in, say, 2003 that, in the wake of a lawless
administration, we would vote a constitutional lawyer into the White
House as a “peace candidate” and he’d do exactly what you’ve done so far
(see, again, above), you wouldn’t have believed it, would you? And if I
had told you it would be you, I’ll put my money on your laughing me out of any room (not that I’ve ever been in a room with you).

Just the other day, something leaked by two “administration officials” onto the front-page of the New York Times
got me started on this letter. In a piece headlined “Election Spurred a
Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy,” reporter Scott Shane wrote
that, fearing you might lose to Mitt Romney, you were rushing to
develop “a formal rule book,” including “explicit rules for the targeted
killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would
inherit clear standards and procedures.” You won the election, of
course, but Shane claims you’re “still pushing” — though at a far more
leisurely pace — “to make the rules formal and resolve… exactly when
lethal action is justified.”

To use your term, you are putting “a legal architecture” in place for
a process of White House-directed robotic assassination — you call them
“targeted killings” — that will presumably be long-lasting. These are
acts that in the years before 9/11, as Shane points out, Washington used
to condemn when Israel committed them and that most countries consider
illegal to this day.

I understand why the idea of Mitt Romney as assassin-in-chief made you nervous and why you wanted to put him in a straitjacket of drone codification. But it’s hard not to ask — and I’m not the first
to do so — what about you? It’s human nature to trust ourselves over
the other guy, but has it occurred to you that some of us might have the
same reaction to you at the helm of a globalizing robot war as you had
to Mitt?

In any case, haven’t you already managed to do to yourself what you
planned to do to him — without cutting down the killing appreciably,
including the deaths of civilians, children, at least four American citizens, and a Yemeni deputy provincial governor
who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda? If press reports are to be
believed, you’ve already been fully involved in regularizing,
bureaucratizing, legalizing, and codifying your drone wars. In other
words, you’ve put yourself deep inside a developing system in which you
no longer have a hope in hell of imagining the world any other way.

Here’s a little history of the process (not that you of all people don’t already know it): You inherited an ad hoc
Bush administration program of CIA drone strikes in the Pakistani
tribal borderlands that started in 2004 and was originally aimed at top
al-Qaeda types. But as will happen, those “targeted killings” became
ever less targeted, spreading to lower level al-Qaeda types, Taliban
leaders, Taliban “foot soldiers,” and finally what came to be called
“signature strikes” against “patterns of behavior.” (A group of military-age males with weapons, say, in an area believed to be controlled by Islamic extremists.)

We know that President Bush took you aside
at the changeover moment and urged you to continue the drone wars in
Pakistan (along with his cyberwar program against Iran). And though it
must have been very new to you, you did so, expanding them in Pakistan
and extending them in a major way to Yemen, while ever more drone bases were built in key areas of the world and ever more drones ordered up.

As this happened, those wars became ever less ad hoc, ever
more organized and bureaucratic. A regular process for deciding on
individual “targets” came into being. You had your “baseball cards”
(PowerPoint slides on potential individuals to target) that you
discussed in your regular “Terror Tuesday” meetings. Where once George W. Bush kept in his desk drawer a “personal scorecard,” a list of bad guys to cross out whenever one of them was killed, you now have an official “kill list.” Where once these strikes were just launched, you got the Office of Legal Counsel to produce a 50-page legalistic justification for using drones to kill a U.S. citizen. It and other legal memos on drone use have never been released to the public or even to congressional leaders. Still, your top officials feel free to use them
to their advantage in public defense of U.S. counterterror policies.
(Note that the Bush administration did the same thing with its torture
policies, producing Justice Department “torture memos”
that “legalized” acts which, in almost any other context, or if
committed by any enemy nation, would have been denounced as nightmarish
acts of international illegality and that, in the past, the U.S. had prosecuted as crimes of war.)

Now, Shane reports, you’ve had the urge to codify it all and so
institutionalize a presidential right to conduct assassination campaigns
without regard to Congress, the American people, national sovereignty,
the world, or previous standards of legality. And that is an
accomplishment of the first order. I mean — Voilà! — you’ve officially created the box that no one can think outside of.

You are — so the story goes — the most powerful man on Earth. From
the Oval Office, you should have the widest of wide-angle views. But
sometimes don’t you feel that you’re trapped like a rat inside a maze in
part (but only in part) of your own creation?

Dreaming Before It’s Too Late

Of course, I’ve never gotten nearer to the Oval Office than
Pennsylvania Avenue, so what do I know about how it’s like there? Still,
I’m older than you and I do know how repetitive acts rigidify, how one
possible way morphs into the only way, how one limited system of living
comes to seem like the only option on Earth. It happens with age. It
also happens in Washington.

The other day, I noted this little passage in a New York Times
report on the discovery of huge quantities of ice on Mercury: “Sean C.
Solomon, the principal investigator for [the spacecraft] Messenger, said
there was enough ice there to encase Washington, D.C., in a frozen
block two and a half miles deep.” I couldn’t help smiling. After all,
the Washington I read about already seems enclosed in a block of ice,
which is why, when it comes to the world, it so seldom thinks a new
thought or acts in a new way.

If only you could reverse time and take a step back into the world of
the community organizer. After all, what does such an organizer do, if
not try to free people from the rigidities of their lives, the boxes
they can’t think outside of, the blocks of ice they’re encased in, the
acts that have come to dominate them and regularly wipe out any sense of
alternative possibilities? What’s the point of community organizing if
not to allow people to begin to imagine other ways of being and
becoming?

Maybe you don’t even realize how you’ve been boxed into, and boxed
yourself into, the codifications from hell, almost all based on our militarizing way of life.
Outside that box where the bureaucratized killing takes place, where
the “wars” are fought, and the battle plans are endlessly recalibrated
in ways too familiar to matter, outside the airless world of the
National Security Complex where one destructive set of ways has become
the only way, there surely are other possibilities that could result in
other kinds of worlds. After all, just because you’re trapped in a box
doesn’t mean that the world is. Look at the Middle East. For better or
worse, it visibly isn’t.

Back in 2009 when you first took office, I wrote a speech
for you. In it, “you” told the American people that you were “ending,
not expanding, two wars.” I knew that you would never give such a speech
(much less read mine), but I did believe that, despite the “wisdom” of
Washington, you could indeed have put both of Bush’s wars — Iraq and
Afghanistan — behind you. We’ll never know, of course. You chose
another path, a “surge”
of 30,000 troops, CIA operatives, special forces operators, private
contractors, and State Department types that led to yet more disastrous
years in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the ghostly what-ifs of history count for nothing.
Still, haven’t you ever wondered whether something else wasn’t possible?
Whether, for instance, sending bombs and missiles into
poverty-stricken, essentially energy-less, essentially foodless Yemen
was really and truly the way to world peace?

My apologies! I let sarcasm get the better of me. How about: really
and truly the way to enhance U.S. national security? Honestly, Yemen?
Most Americans couldn’t find it on the map to win the lottery, and according to reports, American drone and air strikes have actually increased membership in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And yet you won’t stop. You probably can’t.

Similarly, don’t you ever wonder whether a “pivot” to Asia, mainly
involving military power and guaranteed to exacerbate regional relations
in the Pacific is the best way to deal with the rising power of China?
After all, what would it mean to go to war with the country which now
holds well more than $1 trillion in U.S. debt? Wouldn’t it be like shooting ourselves in the foot, if not the head?

And don’t you ever wonder whether a labyrinth of 17 (yes, 17!) major agencies and outfits in the U.S. “Intelligence Community” (and even more minor ones), spending at least $75 billion
annually, really makes us either safe or smart? Mightn’t we be more
“intelligent” and less paranoid about the world if we spent so much less
and relied instead on readily available open-source material?

I mean, there are so many things to dream about. So many ghostly
possibilities to conjure up. So many experimental acts that offer at
least a chance at another planet of possibility. It would be such a
waste if you only reverted to your community-organizer or
constitutional-law self after you left office, once “retirement
syndrome” kicked in, once those drones were taking off at the command of
another president and it was too late to do a thing. You could still
dream then, but what good would those dreams do us or anyone else?

Writing a letter to a man that kills kids using drones and sanctions and appealing to his better nature would seem to me to be a waste of time.

Using logic and reason on a man puffed up with conceit because of his infinite power is also rather non-productive.

The only way to get action is to bring Obama down. There are ways!

Bruce Richardson

Great letter Tom…eloquence if not poetry! The rhetorical chasm between reality and White House pronouncements is as wide as the Grand Canyon and expanding. With the drone program one is reminded of the Nazi blitz during WWII, a similar terror tactic and one which we excoriated loudly and often. In the wake of that horror, the US and the world prosecuted those responsible. Later, from 1979-1989, the poor Afghans were blitzed by Soviet Scud Missiles from the heavens above which took many non-combatant lives. As has been our wont, we rejected such barbaric tactics then, so how can we now, but with a clear conscience, criticize others when we engage in the identical terror tactics of those criminals of yesteryear?

Geraldo Kaprosy

Englehardt is fantasizing here. I can't tell if the is in awe of the assassin or just scared shitless. How does one appeal to the better nature of a psychopathic killer?

Lorraine

Great article about, what some might say, is the advent of the Antichrist.

Jaime

I have always thought that Obama's problem is psychological. He wants to show the white men around that he can be smarter and tougher than them. Somehow he feels he must make amends for his having gotten the Presidency of the US, but this is a secret thought that nobody knows and he would never recognize, not even to himself. Initially he was awed and grateful. Now he is trapped. However, he's enjoying the ride because it's exhilarating, still. Power evidently intoxicates him the way cocaine does to a drug addict. And to keep it, he seems to be willing to do anything, even throw his values out the window.

musings

I agree with your impression that Obama is trapped in something not of his own making. I think as Americans we have always believed in originality and in the uniqueness of our leaders. We always believe they are so filled with the power conferred by the voters, ourselves, that they can make a fresh start. But when it is now quite obvious that they cannot undo the acts of their predecessors (such as Bush and Cheney), and seem forced to continue the "it will not end in our lifetimes" GWOT — well, perhaps I am just pessimistic – Obama is only the first president after "9/11-changed-everything" Bush. But everything he does seems to be part of an elaborate act, where he is tiptoeing around the far more powerful interests, those whose power exceeds the president's. It just seems more weird than ever, what with the new technological means to spy and to kill (and then to talk about it as though it were nothing!).

I understand Tom Engelhardt's reaction – a kind of gob-smacked daze – because when I think about it that is how I feel too.

But what is the cause? If we say that Obama does what he does because he is black, and he wants people to think he is just as comfortable killing people as ex-Governor Bush was (who seemed to enjoy executing death row inmates, before he took on Saddam), well, I don't think it has to be that. A white president in these times might be just as anxious not to appear "soft on terror" or on Muslims. But maybe more than being black, being a descendant on one side of his family from Muslims might make Obama sensitive to those impressions by others (and the Right has been goading him, driving him perhaps, with that "he's a secret Muslim" story). But again, I think that unless a lot changes at all levels of government and in the search for truth in this country, we are going to keep on having these presidents who ignore international treaties, the Constitution, and the verdict of history.